To claim Jerry Warren was a good director wouldn't be just an overstatement,
it would essentially be wrong. Warren simply wasn't very accomplished
behind the camera, and he wasn't at all helped by his scripts, many of
which he wrote himself, or the material lifted from Mexico genre films he
frequently incorporated into his movies and which did not necessarily make
much sense. And the topics his films tackled are invariably of the trash
variety, with little in terms of redeeming values.

Yet just
like another bad trash director, Ed Wood [Ed
Wood bio - click here], many of Jerry Warren's definitely
below-average films are held in high regard by trash movie enthusiasts like
myself and have thus been made readily available on home video and later
DVD time and again over the years, giving them much more of a spotlight
than they would have deserved merely judging from their objective
qualities - yet in cinema and especially genre cinema, judging films
merely by objective standards will invariably obscure your view upon the
fun stuff ...

Early Life, Early Career

Jerry Warren was born in 1925, in Los Angeles, California. Little is
known about his early life, but sometime in his late teens/early 20's, the
movie bug must have bitten him, and he started out as a bit player,
appearing in films like the Chic Johnson/Ole Olsen comedy Ghost
Catchers (1944, Edward F.Cline) and who knows how many other films.
Unfortunately though, Warren wasn't much of an actor, so he never got past
"uncredited"-status. However, Warren used his days as a
bit-player to learn plenty about the film business, and eventually he came
to the conclusion if he wanted real power in movies, he had to become a
producer/director ...

From Man Beast to Teenage Zombies: Genre Movies in the
1950's

Jerry Warren it seems had found just the right time to make his
dreams of becoming a producer/director reality: The mid-1950's. This was a
time when the studio system was at its weakest yet drive-ins from all over
the country were in bad need of films to sell to their teenage crowd.
Drive-in owners in these days were not all that peculiar about quality of
the fare they were showing, since their teenaged patrons were a rather
undistinguishing crowd that came to have fun with their friends, get past
first base with their partners of the opposite sex on their cars'
backseats, and maybe party a bit.
They wanted movies that had an easy-to-follow story, a few cheap thrills,
and a sensationalist plotline that promised something this then new medium,
television, would not show. Actual quality hardly ever came into this
equation.

Like Roger Corman [Roger
Corman bio - click here] and others, Jerry Warren was quick to realize
that movies could be sold on their poster-motives and titles alone, and if you
had a good poster, you didn't have to worry about the film attached to it
all that much anymore - which was of course an invaluable fact to know for
any low budget producer (and Jerry Warren always was his own moneyman)
since it took pressure of actual production-values and allowed more
shortcuts.

Why is that?

Because as long as the posters at the drive-in
promised the teenage crowd the stuff they wanted to see, they would come,
and if you didn't show a total bomb, they wouldn't complain. Point is that
the drive-ins were more of a social gathering ground to begin with, and
not too many teenagers actually came for a particular film or were
interested in a particular director. One was just going to the drive-in
because everybody else was there, too ...

Jerry Warren's debut as a
director was Man Beast (1956), a film about an expedition into the
Himalayas in search of the Yeti, an expedition that is led astray by a
creepy mountain guide (George Skaff), who for some reason also works
hand-in-hand with the snowmen ...

Considering both Warren's lack of
experience as director/producer and the questionable quality of his future
films, Man Beast is actually pretty decent, the scenery at least
seems authentic, some actual outside shots are surprisingly
well-handled (and might actually be stock footage, but there is no
definite proof for that), Warren has actually been able to create
something resembling atmosphere, and even the monster, cheap as it is on
closer inspection, is at least effective. Sure, the film is marred by an
onslaught of dialogue (as are many B-movies of the era, to be quite
honest), but even that doesn't ruin the movie.

(By the way, there is one
interesting piece of trivia about Man Beast: It's supposed to star
an actor called Rock Madison in the lead, yet this was only an alias made
up by Warren for actor Tom Maruzzi - and yet Maruzzi is credited with his
real name as well while Madison's character name fits no one in the film -
thus despite being top-billed, made-up Madison is not in this one. Despite
being non-existant, Madison's also supposed to be in Warren's Creature
of the Walking Dead [1965].)

While Warren still
restrained himself considering dialogue scenes in Man Beast, he almost went
over-board with his next film, The
Incredible Petrified World (1957): Here the story about a diving
bell gone missing miles below the surface and the adventures the divers
have in an undersea world is frequently brought to a standstill by
pseudo-scientific exchanges by a bunch of scientists including John
Carradine [John Carradine
bio - click here] - who would by the way over the years become a
Jerry Warren-regular. Actually, the film seems to be stopped cold before
it even got a chance to start by an overload of dialogue, when Warren has
characters discussing the film's setup rather than actually showing it. Of
course, all the dialogue is a mere cover-up for the fact that the special
effects of the movie are simply not up to the task, so it seems to be
Warren's logic that the more scientific something sounds, the more real it
will seem.

All that said, The
Incredible Petrified World is not entirely without action and
effects, we do have a diving bell, some diving, a world of caves and an
underground volcano-eruption, so the film does deliver some (not that
greatly staged) action - along with and endless string of explanations -, and
at least some excitement coupled with lots and lots of talk - and to be quite
honest, compared to other independent low budget sci-fi drive-in flicks of
the time, The
Incredible Petrified World is no better or worse than the bulk of
them - and it's pure enjoyment to bad movie fans from 50+ years later ...

It
should be noted here that besides John Carradine, another future Jerry
Warren-regular made his Jerry Warren-debut in this one, veteran B-movie
and television actor Robert Clarke, who would pop up in Warren's
filmography time and again.

Of
course, all of Warren's films were primarily made for a teenaged audience,
but with his next one, he made clear who the target audience was even in
the title: Teenage
Zombies (1959) - and I'm talking about the teenage part of
the title here, not the zombies, although ...

In scale, Teenage
Zombies is much more modest than either Man Beast
or The
Incredible Petrified World, no Himalayas or undersea worlds here,
but that doesn't mean the film couldn't have an outrageously wild plot
that combines teens who go to an far-off island for some quality make-out
time with a mad scientist, evil communists and of course zombies. Of
course, the whole story makes little sense, but then again, who cares, for
audiences back in the late 1950's, it had just enough thrills to remain
entertaining, while today's audiences will rather laugh about the silly
storyline and the even sillier dialogue, the bad make up and of course the
man in an unconvincing gorilla-suit - and justifiably so.

It should also
be noted that Teenage
Zombies was Warren's crappiest film so far - while Man Beast
and The
Incredible Petrified World still boasted some production values
(though they were by no means A-movies), there is pretty much nothing of
the sort in Teenage
Zombies: The beach scenes could have been shot pretty much
everywhere in California, the scenes on the open sea are less than
impressive, the villainess's abode seems to be a very nice middle class
home - Warren's own home one wonders - and her lab is incredibly cheaply
equipped.

And speaking of the villainess, she is played by Katherine
Victor, a former stage and radio actress who had made her big-screen debut
in the trash classic Mesa
of Lost Women (1953, Ron Ormond, Herbert Tevos), and who would
stay with Warren for the rest of his career.

One interesting
and little-known fact about Jerry Warren's career is that he not only was a
director/producer and general jack-of-all-trades on his movies (after all,
personnel doesn't come in cheap and why pay someone to do something you
can do yourself?), no, in 1959 he also recorded two hit singles, Street
of Love and Monkey Walk, as Jerry Warren and his Pets.
Now of course, Warren was no Elvis Presley, but his tunes were not half
bad, songs targeted at the same teenage audience that went to see his
films, and they were at least moderately successful.

Going Wild in the 1960's

While his last movie Teenage
Zombies was a pretty crappy cheapo, Jerry Warren's next one, Terror
of the Bloodhunters (1962) was actually a pretty accomplished
piece of cinema. Sure, the title promised a savage and primitive jungle
adventure Italian exploitation directors would not make until 10 to 20
years later, and the film failed to deliver on that account, but instead
we are treated to a pretty sincere film about some prison escapees
(including Robert Clarke and Dorothy Haney) trying to make it through the
jungle and stay out of the way of the natives (which they succeed in but
their pursuers don't). Of course, the film is strictly B-fare and the
jungle is actually some North-American forest spiced up with a bit of
stock footage of forest animals and scenes of native rituals and a burning
native village, but as such it works pretty well, it features hardly any
unintentionally funny scenes, is way less talky than most of Warren's
other films, and is very competently made regarding its very low budget.
And despite a deliberate use of stock footage (something all jungle films
of the day had in common), it looks pretty much like being made out of
one piece.

Speaking of stock footage: Nobody knows what gave
Jerry Warren the idea, maybe it was pasting the jungle footage shot by
someone else into his own film, maybe he just needed to deliver a film and
fast, but in 1962, Jerry Warren started a kind of filmmaking he would
eventually become famous for: his cut-and-paste movies. This essentially
meant he took whatever films he could get his hands on cheaply, cut away
all the material he felt he wouldn't need, shot some new scenes mostly
featuring his regular actors (e.g. John Carradine and Katherine Victor) talking
about what's happening in his source material, edited everything together
and sold it as a new original film. There were of course two problems with
this tactic: 1) The films Warren would get his hands on were usually not
very good to begin with, and 2) Warren wasn't a talented enough director
to improve these films quality-wise and especially his sense of pacing was off most
of the time. Apart from that, in order to not have too much troubles
lip-synching the dialogue at dubbing, Warren took most of the dialogue
scenes out of his source films, which ironically made these films extra talky,
because now he needed voice overs to explain the action and had to
introduce new characters who do nothing more than talking about what's
going on.

Why Jerry Warren did not just leave the films as they were and
provide them with a decent dubbing job is not wholly understandable, but I
guess it's a combination of 3 reasons, 1) he was no expert in dubbing, 2)
he wanted to have a certain creative control over the films he put out,
and 3) pure professional pride, he saw himself as a producer-director, not
distributor, so he had to make the movies his before he put them
out.

The cut-and-paste-method of filmmaking is of course highly
reminiscent of Godfrey Ho's ninja movies of the 1980's [Godfrey
Ho bio - click here], yet Jerry Warren was by no means the
first one using this technique, which might be as old as cinema (or rather
editing) itself. The schlockiest example of cut-and-paste movies prior to
Warren's movies is possibly The
White Gorilla (Harry L.Fraser) from 1945, starring Ray Crash
Corrigan [Crash Corrigan
bio - click here] in the bridging scenes while the actual story
sequences are lifted from the 1927 silent (!) serial Perils of the
Jungle (Jack Nelson) - which White
Gorilla-director Harry L.Fraser actually wrote. To go further back
in film history, the 1935 serial Queen
of the Jungle (Robert F.Hill) was pretty much entirely built
around action scenes from the 1922 serial Jungle Goddess (William
N.Selig). And it's not just cheap B-movies and serials either that used material from other films, even the first
Tarzan-film
starring Johnny Weissmuller [Johnny Weissmuller bio - click
here]Tarzan
the Ape Man borrowed quite a bit of footage from Trader Horn
(1931, also by W.S.Van Dyke), while later Tarzan films often came back to
Tarzan
the Ape Man for a bit of extra (action) material, including the
Turkish Tarzan
Istanbul'da/Tarzan
in Istanbul (1952, Orhan Atadeniz) and 1959's Tarzan, the Ape
Man (Joseph M.Newman) starring Denny Miller, which unlike the
Weissmuller-film was shot in colour though (!).

These are only randomly
chosen examples though and the fact that they are all jungle pictures is
due to the facts that 1) jungle pictures are naturals to use stock footage
to fake rich wildlife in the first place, so why not use still more
footage from other sources? And 2) I just love the genre, and if it serves to make a point
better than other genres, so what?

Back to
Jerry Warren though:

The first film he was giving his
cut-and-paste-treatment was Rymdinvasion
i Lappland/Terror
in the Midnight Sun (1959, Virigl W.Vogel), a Swedish film that
has the distinction of being the probably first and only giant monster
movie to be set and shot in Lapland. In all, Terror
in the Midnight Sun is a rather beautifully shot film that is less
than special though when it comes to the monster, a very badly done
creature. On closer inspection though, Terror
in the Midnight Sun is an odd choice to give an American makeover,
since the film was shot (mostly) in English anyways, and easily
understandable English at that, had a clear narrative structure, and
pretty much followed the typical drive-in sci-fi formula as it was. Sure,
it was also a tad boring, but so were pretty much all of Warren's films
with their onslaught of dialogue every now and again ...

For some reason
though Jerry Warren thought he knew better when he turned Terror
in the Midnight Sun into Invasion of the Animal People in
1962, put a few American actors including his regulars John Carradine [John Carradine
bio - click here] and
Katherine Victor in a weird and unnecessary framing plot, and made some
weird re-cuts of and additions to the original film so it made less sense,
like adding a subplot about the aliens' telepathic powers and rearranging
the film in a way that the spaceship landing that starts the action now happens almost 20 minutes into the movie (it occured right at the
beginning of Terror
in the Midnight Sun).

Invasion of the Animal People
is of course entertaining for all the wrong reasons, but Warren must have
been pleased enough with the results (or was it just that he didn't care?)
that he released more cut-and-paste jobs onto the public, starting with The
Violent and the Damned and A Bullet for Billy the Kid in 1963.

The
Violent and the Damned is a prison movie based on the Argentinian film
La Balandra Isabel Llegó esta Tarde (1950, Carlos Hugo
Christensen) while A Bullet for Billy the Kid is a Western (duh)
using portions from the Mexican movie Una Bala es mi Testigo (1960,
Chano Urueta) starring popular Mexican cowboy actor Gaston Santos held
together by scenes featuring Steve Brodie and Lloyd Nelson, among others.

Unfortunately,
there is little to say about either film beyond that because they are both
considered lost nowadays.

Certainly not lost is Attack of
the Mayan Mummy (1964), a film based on the Mexican La Momia Azteca/Attack
of the Aztec Mummy (1957, Rafael Portillo). Attack of the Mayan
Mummy is the exception to the rule considering Warren's
cut-and-paste-movies inasmuch as here, the originally shot footage by
Warren actually outweighs the footage lifted from Attack of the Aztec
Mummy. The odd thing though, nothing really happens in the newly shot
footage, it just shows characters commenting on what has just happened in
the Mexican footage or contemplating what will happen - and it all seems
to serve primarily one purpose: To avoid having to dub and lip-synch too much
dialogue of the
original footage. The result is so bad in fact that the film has come to
be known as a trash masterpiece ...

While Attack of the
Mayan Mummy was made up more than half of original footage, Face
of the Screaming Werewolf (1964) used almost no newly shot scenes
- but it used most of the scenes Warren used for the earlier film from Attack
of the Aztec Mummy again, as more or less of a back-up plot for his main
story: You see, for Face
of the Screaming Werewolf, Warren got his hands on another Mexican
film called La Casa del Terror (1960, Gilberto Martínez Solares),
which sounded too good to be true for a low budget filmmaker like him,
because it featured Lon Chaney jr [Lon
Chaney jr bio - click here] as a mummy turning into a werewolf
(!). Sure, Chaney's heyday was long past, but he still carried enough
marquee value to make a buck or two off - and seeing him playing a mummy
turning into a werewolf, well that's certainly a new twist that should
attract some extra crowds. There was just one problem with La Casa del
Terror: It was a rather naive and childish comedy starring Germán
Valdés - and not even a very good one at that. Still, that alone wasn't a
fact to deter a filmmaker like Jerry Warren, he just edited out all the
funny parts (including pretty much all scenes featuring Germán Valdés)
to make it into a serious film ... and yet, stripped of its comedy, La
Casa del Terror was so thin on plot that not even Jerry Warren's
typical bridging sequences could make something out of it ... and thus the
scenes from Attack of the Aztec Mummy were simply re-used, with
some voiceovers and talking heads in the newly filmed scenes (this time
it's actually a bunch of newscasters) explaining away all the film's
inconsistencies - or at least that was the plan, the finished film is
unfortunately simply chaotic, nonsensical, and not even half as funny as its
making-of-story might suggest.

Like Face
of the Screaming Werewolf, Curse of the Stone Hand uses
material from not one but two existing movies, this time from Chile. But
while both Attack
of the Aztec Mummy and La Casa del
Terror were at least rather recent movies in 1964, the films Warren
used for Curse of the Stone Hand - La Casa está Vacía
(1945, Carlos Schlieper) and the Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation La
Dama de la Muerte (1946, Carlos Hugo Christensen) - were already
almost 20 years old, and of course it showed. At least this time around,
Warren had the good sense to not try to mix and mash them together but
tell them one after the other anthology style (with scenes with John
Carradine and Katherine Victor rather clumsily linking them), but then
again, he used less than half of each movie and thus pretty much failed to
do the source material justice or giving the audience a coherent picture.

For
Creature of the Walking Dead (1965), Warren again relied on
something Mexican, and a film closer to home, too, La Marca del Muerto
(1960, Fernando Cortes), an atmospheric mad scientist-tale. And the
atmosphere of the source film is actually Creature of the Walking Dead's
saving grace, since despite his best attempts - like doing almost no
dubbing but have a narrator do narration over dialogue scenes and such -
Warren is unable to totally destroy the film, like he did with his earlier
efforts. Katherine Victor by the way is in this one (in the Warren-shot scenes
only of course) again, along with B-movie legend Bruno VeSota, whom Warren
had previously used in several of his cut-and-paste films.

House of the
Black Death (1965) is the last of Warren's cut-and-paste jobs and also
an exception among them, inasmuch as it was based on an unfinished
US-American film, the 1959 flick (tentatively titled) Night of the
Beast by Harold Daniels, starring John Carradine (yup, he was in the
original scenes this time, not Warren's additional ones) [John Carradine
bio - click here] and Lon Chaney jr [Lon
Chaney jr bio - click here]. Warren added the ending to the
film and seemingly randomly threw in newly shot scenes starring among
others Katherine Victor (who would have thought). However, in this film
about Satanists, Warren's newly shot scenes work much better with the
source material, and the fact that the film was unfinished also seems to
work in his favour, as this way he got more creative control over the
material than when merely shooting around an existing, finished film.

With
House of the Black Death, Warren ultimately left the realm of
cut-and-paste filmmaking to make what many consider to be the ultimate
Jerry Warren film (though it's not all that typical for his body of work)
while others consider it the worst movie of all time (which it isn't -
though it's bad enough) while yet others simply don't get it: The
Wild World of Batwoman/She
was a Hippy Vampire (1966).

The
Wild World of Batwoman is essentially about a bunch of bad guys
trying to steal an all-powerful hearing aide (!) and the attempts of
superheroine Batwoman (as played by Katherine Victor) and her bikini-clad
Batgirls to keep it out of their hands - and in the end, the all-powerful
hearing aide turns into an all-powerful bomb, too ...

The main mistake
many people make concerning The
Wild World of Batwoman is to take it seriuosly, which it was never
intended to be - actually, the film was more of an hommage to/rip-off of/cash-in on
the then extremely popular Batman
TV-series starring Adam West, itself a masterpiece of campy and surreal
nonsense. And made on a way tighter budget than the series, Warren's film tries to
duplicate its over-the-top ideas - and yet fails, at times even miserably,
mainly because humour was never Jerry Warren's forte and because what was
campy in the original is only childish here.

However, The
Wild World of Batwoman still has its saving grace, which comes to
the fore every time Warren does not try to copy Batman
and lets his own pulp fantasies run amok, like in the Batgirls' skimpy
outfits, in the Batwoman costume that suggests more of an exotic dancer
than a superheroine, Warren's urge to include some monsters - lifted from
another movie (1956's The Mole People
by Virgil W.Vogel) - in the film, even if they make no narrative sense,
and so on and so forth. In all, The
Wild World of Batwoman shows Jerry Warren at his trippiest - and
this time, it's all his own doing, too, he didn't have to mix and mash
footage from other movies (the tiny bits from The Mole People
aside) to make something new, this time the craziness must have been
intended ... and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say ouch!!! or just be happy
that the film has been allowed to see the light of day (or darkness of a
projection room) at all ...

Speaking of, the release of a film
called The
Wild World of Batwoman did not go unnoticed by DC
Comics, Batman's
owner/publisher. After spotting the many similarities between one of their
flagship characters and this independent low-to-no budget movie, they sued
over the Batwoman-name - which is why the film has been originally pulled
from distribution to later be re-released as She
was a Hippy Vampire in some areas, even if there were no hippies
or vampires in the movie (which is why it was equipped with a new beginning that shed
at least some light on the vampire angle).

Makes one wonder though why a
big company like DC
Comics was so terribly afraid of a little independent film ...

Frankenstein Island:
A Fitting Swan Song

Possibly out of frustration over the events surrounding The
Wild World of Batwoman and DC
Comics, Jerry Warren pulled out of the film business after the
release of that film as She
was a Hippy Vampire to concentrate on other business options ...
but then again, what goes for every self-respecting zombie also goes for
almost all of the more eccentric figureheads of the horror genre: You
can't keep a good man down - and thus in 1981, when he was pretty much
forgotten by his fans of old (which were not all that many) and before
rediscovery of films like his on home video kicked in, he out of the blue
released a new film, 15 years after his last one, and yet he had assembled
most of his regulars from yesteryear again, like Katherine Victor, Robert
Clarke, even John Carradine [John Carradine
bio - click here] and frequent Jerry Warren-guest star Steve Brodie,
plus veteran B-actor Cameron Mitchell, a newcomer to Warren's cinematic
realm.

The film in question, Frankenstein
Island, is a story about a group of balloonists stranded on an island
full of bikini-clad girls and monsters and controlled by the daughter
(Katherine Victor) of Frankenstein (John Carradine), who is with her as a
ghost - and it is pure narrative madness, but it's also a great (and
unintentional?) hommage by Jerry Warren to himself: in its mix-and-mash
structure of story- and genre-elements it is reminiscent of Warren's
cut-and-paste-movies, while its unrestrained throwing around of pulp
clichés can be traced back to The
Wild World of Batwoman, and yet storywise, the film is remarkably
similar to Teenage
Zombies, with Katherine Victor even playing a similar role in both
movies.

The outcome of this strange blend is of course utter trash and
maybe one of the worst movies Warren has ever made - and at the same time,
it's simply hilarious and a film that's hard to top in terms of low-budget
outrageousness ...

Of course though, the early 1980's were no
longer the 1950's, and by 1981, Waren's directorial style seemed terribly
outdated, as low budget filmmaking had moved on from 1950's drive-in
routines quite significantly - so the film failed to find a large audience
(though it has probably made its money back on home video).

Warren could
not help but notice his time as a filmmaker was over, and he never shot
another film.

He died from cancer in Escondido, California, 1988, at the
age of just 63. But as unlikely as it seemed during his lifetime,
probably, his films, with all their obvious, undeniable flaws, have lived
on since then and will continue to do so for quite a while now, at least
as long as there are trash movie lovers like myself.